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" I'm just trying to normalize my life and get ready for the last 20 years or whatever I've got. It's a lot to take care of. "

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" I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together. "

" I have a problem with the way the media deals with a lot of law enforcement issues. "

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" Most people like a little sex in their novels. "

" People in California don't live in a place so much as they do a condition. "

" A lot of my friends were retiring from the newspaper business, and the newspaper pensions are not enormous. "

" I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are. "

" A lot of cops in fiction are very depressive and are kind of downbeat, and they've got all kinds of existential angst that they're dealing with. "

" Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing. "

" I've always thought of myself as a journalist; that was what I did. "

" Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me. "

" My kids, who are grown now and living in L.A., are used to me packing up and taking off to somewhere weird. "

" Books set in Brooklyn and L.A. are often about people who are rootless, who want to go somewhere else. In the Midwest, though, the stories are about people who want to stay where they are - who like where they are. "

" When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart. "

" Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness. "

" Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches. "

" Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness. "

" The difference is this: If you write a good book, it'll get published. If you have a great screenplay, there is no guarantee. "

" There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting. "

" Before the Internet became so powerful, I toured extensively. With the rise of the Internet, touring apparently has become less important. "

" With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop. "

" There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan's, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they're intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back. "

" People ought to be slapped up side of the head, not always get what they expect. That's why sometimes the bad guy gets away. "

" I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers. "

" Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations. "

" That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating. "

" I once paddled a canoe the length of the Mississippi River all the way from Itasca to New Orleans. "

" Most people in protest mobs are pretty sincere and don't want to fight cops or break things. "

" Working for the 'Miami Herald' in 1972, I covered street action for both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in Miami and saw probably the most violent conventions ever - more violent than even 1968 in Chicago. "

" If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause. "

" You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life. "